The news sources are full of the story that a ‘Muslim’ officer was excused from guarding the Israeli embassy during the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

I have two questions.

First, who leaked this story to the press, and what effect did they hope to produce?

Second, why are news sources concentrating on the fact that the officer was a Muslim?

It seems to me that the important feature of this officer’s identity was not that he was a Muslim, as did not ask to be excused from guarding the Israeli embassy prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and once the Israeli bombing of Lebanon ceased he returned to full duties. He was excused from guarding the Israeli embassy during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon because his wife is Lebanese.

read the rest…

I believe these are the correct positions for progressive politics in the modern era. But if others feel they’re not the right policies, and some clearly do, let us debate them openly and candidly.

Tony Blair, ‘No more coded critiques - let’s have an open debate on where we go next‘

This is not an abstract discussion. It is one which touches upon the preservation of the values and freedoms. I look forward to that debate with you.

John Reid, ‘Security, freedom and the protection of our values‘.

I believe it is time now to engage in a new and honest debate about integration and cohesion in the UK.

Ruth Kelly, launching the Commission on Integration and Cohesion.

I’ve asked this before, but where is the forum for these debates? What are the formal mechanisms? Can I join in? I’m not the only one to notice.

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Being a little tired from an overdose of house-moving and tidying, I forgot to remove a cream from my hand luggage, the sight of which made the security staff put me in the extra-thorough check line. Everything was carefully inspected, including my camera, laptop - and my books.

The first one, a German novel, seemed alright. But the second, Murder in Samarkand, Craig Murray’s account of his time as the UK ambassador to Uzbekistan aroused some suspicion…

read the rest…

(via Craig)

The meeting was also attended by the interior ministers of France, Germany, Portugal and Slovenia. They were briefed on the alleged airline bomb plot by MI5 Director General Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller and the head of special operations at Scotland Yard, Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman.

…

The Home Secretary has come under fire for making remarks which could jeopardise any future trial, saying those seized in last Thursday’s raids were the ‘main players’. It is said to have infuriated the Attorney general, Lord Goldsmith.

…

Mr Reid fuelled the impression that he is using the crisis to raise his profile as a potential challenger. He held three photo calls inside two hours, flanked by EU Ministers.

He also handed out a collection of four terror speeches he has made in the past year to bemused journalists. The pack contained a biography of his Cabinet career.

read the rest…

Soon after last year’s London bombings, a photograph emerged that featured two of the perpetrators whitewater rafting in North Wales. Apparently this was the leisure activity during some kind of al-Qaida bonding weekend, if you can imagine any such mini-break without thinking of estate agents chortling, “What goes on tour stays on tour”. Naturally, in light of the horrific tragedies of that July day, it was the mundanity of the image that was so utterly chilling. It was duly captioned along the lines of “a few short months later they were committing mass murder”.

And yet, there is more than one way to view a picture. You can choose to look again at this image and elevate these sodden paddlers to the status of Luftwaffe commanders or Red Army generals, senior strategists in some cohesive global struggle between good and evil in which we are all currently involved. Or you can choose to observe that, to be perfectly honest, they are wearing the same cretinous grin that afflicts us all when captured coming over the brow of a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park, and deem that a fairly useful leveller. And so with the men plotting jihad among the daffodils near Lake Windermere, who may well be holding their war councils in tearooms before breaking off for an eccles cake. Allow yourselves the luxury of a smile.

read the rest…

I have an enduring fascination for political speeches, their construction and the language used, their underlying meanings.

John Reid’s speeches these days are particularly worth picking over. They have, in the past, been the entrails in which others have divined the future (the exhortation for us to be ‘slow to condemn‘ the actions of British troops shortly before the release of video footage of some of them giving a bunch of Iraqis a hiding is the one that immediately springs to mind). It’s worth looking at the widely-trailed (that being a euphemism for it being leaked to the press before he gave it in order to control the news cycle) speech he made to the Demos think tank the day before the alleged plot to bring down however many planes on whatever date was revealed.

One of the more fascinating aspects of political speeches is why they’re even given at all. The meat that the media gets their teeth into usually hangs on pretty meagre bones. On the eight pages of A4 that constitutes a hard copy of Reid’s speech, maybe half to two-thirds of a page (the dramatic beats, naturally) made it as far as the news coverage of the speech. It makes you wonder if the bits that Reid wanted to see in the newspapers were helpfully highlighted in yellow on the copies sent to journalists.

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Either Lord Stevens, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is an idiot who was dangerously promoted past his level competence or he’s gone off half-cocked with a decidedly thin grasp of the facts (as we know them right now) in today’s News of the World.

For instance, every airport in Britain is in chaos over the plane bomb-plot alert as every passenger is subjected to rigorous security checks. Why? They take lots of time, lots of staff, and are extremely expensive.

I’m a white 62-year-old 6ft 4ins suit-wearing ex-cop–I fly often, but do I really fit the profile of suicide bomber? Does the young mum with three tots? The gay couple, the rugby team, the middle-aged businessman?

No. But they are all getting exactly the same amount and devouring huge resources for no logical reason whatsoever. Yet the truth is Islamic terrorism in the West has been universally carried out by young Muslim men, usually of ethnic appearance, almost always travelling alone or in very small groups. A tiny percentage, I bet, of those delayed today have such characteristics.

Now, here’s where Steven’s crackerjack profiling plan falls on it’s abject arse. At least one of the men arrested last week (Abdul Waheed born Don Stewart-Whyte) was a white convert.

I’m a white 35 year-old, 5ft 9ins jeans-wearing ex-computer programmer but do I really fit the profile of suicide bomber?

I happen to have a shaved head and a beard at the minute (I’m an extremely lazy groomer). Did I convert to Islam two or three weeks ago (which is when I last shaved)? No, as it happens. But a customs officer filtering me through a process of top-cop Stevens’ design isn’t to know that.

Using Steven’s uncanny detective abilities, Abdul Waheed would have sailed through security at Heathrow. Maybe we should get a law passed demanding that white converts to Islam black up (a tin of tan boot polish with every Koran, maybe?).

If I was Lord Stevens I’d be firing my ghostwriter this afternoon.

(Link via Tim who has more on this. This post is a version of a comment I left over there.)

Dr Reid is a politician, I suspect, harbouring a severe case of short man syndrome. I can picture him, as a youth, battling with his comrades in a bulldog like manner. Doggedly fighting until the end, stubbornly refusing to be beaten or shamed.

read the rest…

(Via Tim’s ever-fabulous Britblog Roundup.)

Remember the ricin ring that never was and the chemical vest (was it sarin, cyanide or anthrax flavour?) that was never found?

Now we have the red mercury that didn’t exist. This is what you get when newspapers grow bored of the drudge of merely reporting the news and decide they’d rather make it instead. Hopefully the poor sods acquitted in today’s judicial joke will escape the fate of the Algerians acquitted in the ricin risibility - they were swept up again pretty quickly afterwards despite the lack of any new evidence against them.

In the mean time, somebody somewhere is probably cooking up a genuine, ostentatious outside-the-box terrorist spectacular. If it were to hit the news prematurely they’re safe in the knowledge that, after all the comedy capers of recent months, the public will think it’s just another wild story got up by newspapers chasing sales and police officers being led by the nose by idiotic single-sources and wanting to be seen to be Doing Something.

Or not. When you think about the perennial nature of the media thrashings over these story, you could surmise that the public has an insatiable appetite for this we’re-all-gonna-die sub-James Bond bullshit. That’s if you believe newspapers reflect the views of their readers and not vice versa. (Discuss.)

Maybe as the truism goes, people just like to be scared (preferably from a distance). It’s the Terrorist Threat as penny dreadful. The War Against Terror as Commando comics. The papers, never having gone broke playing to the lowest common denominator, play up to it. Instead of picking up your Pan Book of Horror Stories, buy the Sun. Does this stuff play well in the provinces, away from existential London-based terrorist plots, do you think?

Update: Tim Worstall has more:

How in hell was anyone prosecuted for attempting to provide a rare radioactive material when said rare radioactive material does not exist? Who authorised this prosecution?

BTW, no, you don’t get compensation for being held on remand for two years.

Well, that’s just great, isn’t it?

BBC News: Reid reveals 7 July account error

The home Secretary has asked police to explain why a mistake was made in the government’s version of what happened on the day of the London bombings.

John Reid revealed the time at which the bombers left Luton station to head to London was wrong in the official “narrative” of 7 July 2005.

Did nobody think to double check? Did nobody at the Home Office think to make sure the police had it right (Christ know, they’ve been a bit off the mark of late and have been known in the past to be fuzzy on the details)? Even a half-way decent blogger reads things through to make sure their humble efforts aren’t too shabby.

This is an ultimately trivial detail of the narrative but it plays into the hands of the conspiracy nuts who’ve made enough fuss about train times as it is. And their calls for a public inquiry get lumped in by the Government with those from reasonable people with reasonable reasons for having one and everybody gets labelled as yahoos.

As for the Home Office, it was probably too much to expect that a department that can’t get its accounts right or count foreign prisoners would be able to verify the time the first suicide bombers on British soil caught a train. If these people were to get into an arse-kicking contest with a one-legged man, I think we all know who’d win.

Further to this and this, comes this:

I will form part of a human chain around the Westminster no protest zone but only if 6,000 other people will join in.

Go and sign up. Just don’t be first at the bar when we all get to the pub afterwards - that’s a big round.

In an announcement today, the Home Secretary will outline how the UK is to get it’s own Current Threat Level Advisory System similar to the one they have in the US.

Sad to say, but it looks like we won’t be having a colour-coded version as in America. Which is a shame because it would have given the Government the opportunity to drop a hint as to which piece of bad news is being buried under any changing of the THREAT LEVEL and do away with all the tedious guesswork and conspiracy theorising:

You also have to ask what use the knowledge of the THREAT LEVEL is to the general public. Isn’t it rather like the idea of telling parents if they have a paedophile in their neighbourhood (the other I’m-a-man-of-the-people-me initiative recently refloated by John Reid)? In the face of such intelligence, what are you supposed to do, lock yourself and your kids in the house and get pizzas pushed under the door? It’s just more Reassurance GLA-style.

And there is a genuine risk, especially from this bunch of wrigglers and don’t-look-at-that-look-at-this merchants that the THREAT LEVEL will be manipulated for policital reasons. In fact, the thing seems to have been nicked wholsesale from the Bush Administration.

Update: Chris Dillow and an unnamed “senior security source” talking to the Daily Mirror come to the same conclusion…

Chris:

To see another reason for bias, just imagine what would happen if there’s a terrorist attack after the government announced, say, a “moderate” threat. Every knobhead dead tree will accuse the government of understating the threat, of being complacent. The criticism for appearing to overstate the threat will be much smaller. So there’s another incentive to overstate the danger.

The Mirror:

THE new terror warning system was exposed as a sham last night.

A senior security source told the Mirror it would start at “severe” and was unlikely ever to be changed.

He said: “The threat level is going to stay at this level for years to come. The only way it will be adjusted is upwards.”

If the Government really wants to deter terrorists and reassure the public, there is one surefire thing it could do. Post this on every billboard in the land. Finally, Muslim, Christian, Jew and Athiest would be united. Pissing themselves laughing.

If ever proof was needed that The Government Is Not Our Friend, then the treatment of the survivors and the families of the victims of the July 7 bombings is surely it.

Today being the first anniversary of the bombings it’s worth looking back on the treatment of the people who simply had the misfortune to board the wrong tube trains or bus last summer. Those fortunate enough to emerge alive, many with terrible injuries, both physical and psychological, were met with official incompetence, ignorance, suggestions of culpability in future attacks and, on one memorable occasion, outright hostility.

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We can only defeat it if we have people in the community who are going to stand up and not merely say ‘you are wrong to kill people through terrorism… you’re wrong in your view of the West, the whole sense of grievance, the ideology is wrong, is profoundly wrong’.

That was Blair at the Commons liaison committee this morning, telling it like he sees it. To which, I’d argue the only response is: bloody let them then.

After the bombings in July last year, Blair drew together Muslim leaders and other advisers to form seven task forces to investigate Islamic extremism and suggest ways to tackle it. They were given just six weeks to conduct the investigation. Of the 64 recommendations they made in their final report (PDF), only one was implemented.

This lone initiative was for a travelling roadshow of Muslim scholars who would talk with young Muslims and denounce extremism. Foreign Office documents leaked to the New Statesman last week showed that this idea was actually drawn up by the Foreign Office and then presented as a “grass roots initiative” coming out of the task forces.

Muslims told Blair how they could go about tackling extremism but it seems those ideas were deemed not up to snuff. If they were, and the task forces weren’t just yet more pink confetti strewn to amuse the simple-minded and fend off Rebekah Wade for another week, then where are they? For Blair to sit in his shirt sleeves and blithely say it’s for Muslims to get out there and take on the Islamists is, at a generous best, a bloody cheek. They requested the tools for the task asked of them and he said no. What was this exercise for if none of the ideas are going to be used? Sure Blair’s belief, conviction, faith, whatever you want to cal it, it is undeniably impressive (it carried a whole country to war all by itself for a start) but what next? “England could win the World Cup if they only played in bare feet, says Blair”? “Guns? What do you need guns for, says sceptical Blair to army generals”?

With Son of Trident and Blair Force One in the pipe, the money evidently isn’t swilling about like it used to be. But many of the recommendations are eminently sensible and easily put in place at a minimal cost. Schemes allowing Muslim young people to shadow MPs, councillors and community leaders are costed at £125,000 a year. A Muslim Youth Handbook (”containing accessible information on basic Islamic concepts - including the meaning of ‘Jihad’”) to be distributed to mosques, universities and elsewhere is priced at £50,000. These are piffling amount of money compared to the sums this government, with its hard-on for computerising every element of our lives, is spraying over incompetent and rapacious IT companies in return for late and limp lemons.

Like most Government-sponsored initiatives, there’s no guarantee that any of the 64 ideas would have worked. But it doesn’t take Martine Wright, selling her first-floor flat because the loss of her legs means she can no longer use the stairs, or Rachel North, taking taxis to work because the thought of the tube is too much, or Germaine Lindsay’s wife, now raising two young kids on her own, to know that surely anything, anything is worth trying. Especially at these prices - the two ideas mentioned here would cost you just one milli-enquiry (Update: Or less than the idiot-instigated changing of locks at a prison).

“I am probably not the person to go into the Muslim community,” said Blair today. How does he know? If walking into Leeds, Dewsbury, Beeston or Rawthorpe nude but for a sandwich board with “I’M SORRY” painted on it dissuaded just one potential bomber, wouldn’t it be worth it? He’s got nothing to be ashamed of in that department. He can have his bullet and bomb proof car with the engine running nearby, ready to whisk him off back to his bullet and bomb proof life and wife, if the effort and terror of making a difference, saving lives, setting an example, defeating the evil ideology proves too much for him. I mean, can only be provided at a disproportionate cost to whichever group of taxpayers he’s decided are calling the shots this week.

The redoubtable Messrs. Hamster, Kenny and Whitaker have more.

Update: Independent: Blair lays down law to Muslims on extremists in their midst

What Muslims proposed… and what the Government did

* Recommendation: Hold a public inquiry into the “what, how and why of 7/7 and 21/7, “including an inquiry into the root causes”.

Response: Ministers have repeatedly ruled out a public inquiry into the attacks. An internal Home Office narrative of events leading up to the attacks was published earlier this year.

* Recommendation: Establish a rebuttal unit at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to “encourage a more balanced representation of Islam and Muslims in the British media, popular culture and creative industries”.

Response: No unit has so far been established.

* Recommendation: Establish a steering group at the Department for Education and Skills chaired by a minister and including participation from the Muslim community and other experts to “draw up a strategy on combating Islamophobia in education”.

Response: The Education Department said it had work in hand on combating Islamophobia and said concerns about the national curriculum would be addressed in a review to be published in December.

* Recommendation: Establish a British Muslim “citizenship toolkit” to help student societies, mosques, imams and parents combat “violent fanatic tendencies”.

Response: The Labour MP Sadiq Khan said yesterday there had been no progress.

* Recommendation: Set up an “Islam Online” website as a one-stop shop for young British Muslims.

Response: The Muslim Council of Britain’s Inayat Bunglawala, convenor of a working group to combat extremism and radicalisation, said he was still waiting for a response to a formal proposal two months after it was submitted to the Home Office.

Update update: Coffee and PC recalls Jamie’s excellent and depressingly apposite Sinister Platitudes.

Give Us Our 7/7 Inquiry.

Samizdat:

In another example of the Government’s draconian stance on political protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell quote: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined “Blair’s Big Brother Legacy”, which were confiscated by the police. “The implication that I read from this statement at the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material,” said Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine’s London editor, wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were used in evidence under the Act.

Mr Porter said: “The police told Mr Jago this was ‘politically motivated’ material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated area is not regarded as ‘politically motivated’ and evidence of conscious law-breaking.”

Scotland Yard has declined to comment.

Maybe you couldn’t really give a monkey’s about civil liberties, freedom of speech and all that hairy liberal guff that doesn’t get a look in on that Noel Edmonds vehicle you’re obssessed with.

But all this curtailment of liberty don’t come cheap. How much has making a martyr of Brian Haw cost the taxpayer for instance? What price persecuting, not to mention giving him more publicity than he could ever have dreamed of, a man who annoys only chinless researchers, bag carriers, and those with guilty consciences?

Troops in Iraq might have had to buy their own gear - and some have to go without - but you can bet what’s left of your pension that not a single policeman stationed around Parliament Square had to buy his own shiny combat boots.

Worth every penny, no doubt.

(Link via Tim)

Bit late with this, but still…

Remember that fragrant Home Office policy of billing released victims of miscarriages of justice for their prison bed and board?

Here’s another charming one from the Ministry of Defence. You’re a war widow. You receive a war widow’s pension. You have reason to believe your husband was killed by way of negligence on the part of the MoD and decide to sue. You win your case and compensation, a small offset against the loss of your husband. To add insult to injury, the MoD reduces your war widow’s pension.

Still, they may have contributed to the death of your husband, but you’re getting your ten grand a year, aren’t you? Stop whining. That fact that a string of successful court cases might make the MoD re-examine their duty of care to British soldiers is neither here nor there.

So, if (still an if, please note) a link could be found between Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, his information of a plot to bomb the tube or his associates, and those involved in the 7/7 London terrorist attacks, could we then, by pretty much the same logic as [Zacarias] Moussaoui’s prosecutors are using, hold the US accountable for the 7/7 bombs?

read the rest…

British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said on Wednesday.

more…

I have worked out that I gave my details out eleven times at least, possibly more, but by 24th October I was still, apparently, not on an official Department of Culture Media and Sport list of survivors, and nor were many other passengers. This is staggeringly incompetent: I and other people managed to climb out of a bombed train, find each other, look after each other, and now we have almost 100 survivors’ names and details.We have executed a successful media strategy, helped each other find counsellors, fill in compensation firms, find lawyers, medical help, dealt with hundreds of media enquiries, safeguarded ourselves from nutters and wierdoes trying to infiltrate the group, organised a 6 month memorial ceremony, set up a website, campaigned for a public enqury, liased with the police, all whilst holding down a day job and recovering from injuries and PTSD. And nobody has given us any funding: we haven’t asked for it we did it all by ourselves, for free. Meanwhile someone, somewhere has a salary or a grant and a job decription that is about looking after victims of July 7th. I’d like to know what they are bloody well doing, frankly.

However you look at it, Rachel North and the other survivors of the July 7 bombings have been badly, inexcusably let down. They’ve had to fight for every scrap of help and recognition. I’d like to hear a government minister try and justify this. No doubt it’d be hand-wringing laments of being “unable to go into details of individual cases” and “things are improving” and “INSERT NON-SPECIFIC PLATITUDE HERE”.

No wonder the Government don’t want a public inquiry into the bombings. Tales of the careless, aloof, unfeeling and incompetent treatment of these people are the last thing this grubby and limping administration needs right now.

Rachel says she’s tired. All this has made her unwell. She’s talking of taking a break from her blog. I hope when she’s rested and found some peace she’ll come back to us.

Where’s a journalist with balls when you need one?

Fears are mounting for the mental wellbeing of the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke. According to an unnamed source*, many people are alarmed at Mr Clarke’s increasingly passive aggressive behaviour towards the victims of the July 7 bombings and their families. “It’s like that Earth, Wind and Fire song, ‘After The Love Has Gone’,” one is thought to have said.

Relations between Mr Clarke and the victims and survivors began cordially enough. On the eve of the vote on the Terrorism Bill in November 2005, the Home Secretary had coincidentally attended to the memorial service for the victims of the bombings. He spoke of how moved he had been and how the families’ wishes were paramount. “It was very powerful,” he said. “I talked to a lot of families afterwards. They made it clear that we must back the police.” He also said that liberals’ attempts to undermine the demands of the victims’ grief was “pathetic”.

Soon after, however, it was apparent that something was amiss. After having listened so assiduously to the victims’ demands for 90 days detention for terrorist suspects and spoken so forcefully on their behalf, Mr Clarke’s warmth dissipated somewhat. While admitting that victims of terrorism deserved to be given special laws he admitted that he saw being injured in a terrorist outrage in much the same light as being “stabbed outside a pub“.

The victims’ opinions, so vital in drawing up anti-terrorism legislation and in selling the case for the new laws, were regarded as less important when it came to actually finding out why and how the bombings took place. In December last year, when refusing to instigate a public inquiry into the events of July 7, Mr Clarke said with pre-emtive reassurance (it was revealed three days later that MI5 had deemed two of the bombers to be no threat), “Certainly, there is no question of a cover-up of any kind.”

This see-sawing behaviour towards the victims reached an alarming conclusion last week at a clergy meeting at Norwich Cathedral in his constituency. Mr Clarke was approached after the meeting by a parish priest who happened to be the father of one of the survivors of the bombings, who asked:

Congratulations on fixing the meeting so that nobody can ask questions! You will have heard about Rev Julie Nicholson who is so angry she cannot forgive the bombers who killed her daughter on 7th July, well, I have a question, my daughter was feet away from the 7/7 Kings Cross bomb, and she and some other surivors have said they are not angry with the bombers, but with the Government, because there was no public enquiry. Why is there no public enquiry?

Mr Clarke is said to have looked at the priest “in a very nasty way”, and replied: “Get away from me, I will not be insulted by you, this is an insult“.

A nutritionist suggested that Mr Clarke might have been hungry. Famous for his double lunches, Mr Clarke may simply have been too long away from the table. His low blood sugar level may have excerbated his “weakness, mood swings, headaches, nervousness, irritability, or nausea” as well as his “visual disturbances, shaking, sweating, confusion, palpitations, anxiety, dizziness, aggression or severe fatigue”.

Psychologists, however, say** Mr Clarke’s behaviour may be symptomatic of deeper problems. “The passive agressive man protests that others unfairly accuse him rather than owning up to his own misdeeds,” said one. “To remain above reproach, he sets himself up as the apparently hapless, innocent victim of your excessive demands and tirades.” It’s also possible that Mr Clarke is “feeling put upon when he is unable to live up to his promises or obligations,” the psychologist added. “He retreats from pressures around him and sulks, pouts and withdraws.”

A tragic fear of intimacy may also be fuelling the Home Secretary’s increasingly eccentric public displays. Mr Clarke, suggested the psychologist, may be “out of touch with his feelings, reflexively denying feelings he thinks will ‘trap’ or reveal him, like love. He picks fights to create distance.”

This inability to love or form lasting bonds was also echoed by a relationship counsellor*** who added that Mr Clarke’s behaviour was often seen during the break up of short-term relationships. “This is classic behaviour from a promiscuous alpha male after a one night stand,” she could have said. “He’s had his fun, these people are no longer any use to him, and now he’s not returning their calls.”

Unnamed medical sources**** also expressed concern about Mr Clarke’s “epidermal density”. “Such a thin skin coupled with obviously enormous internal pressures could be nothing short of disastrous,” a doctor might have said.

Voiceover: If you or a member of your family been affected by any of the issues mentioned in this post, then Charles Clarke would very much not like to hear from you.

*Am I peddling unattributable gossip or making it up here? You decide. If you read newspapers regularly, are you even bothered?
** Maybe.
***See *.
****And again.

(Why don’t you write to the Home Secretary and ask him why he refuses to hold an public inquiry into the July 7 bombings? It’s a game for all the family and couldn’t be simpler. First you write to the Home Secretary and ask him why he refuses to hold an public inquiry into the July 7 bombings. Then, a month later, you write to the Home Secretary and ask him why he has failed to reply to your letter you sent to ask him why he refuses to hold an public inquiry into the July 7 bombings. Then, a month later…

Or, you could sign the petition)

The case for war has been worn thin, and Bush and Blair’s political authority has gone with it. Yet the striking thing is that, at precisely the same time, the leading anti-war voices in British politics are in disarray. Galloway’s Respect Party and Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats were among the most prominent opponents of the Iraq war. The speed and apparent ease with which both have been thrown into crisis exposes the myth of the powerful anti-war movement.

more…

(Via The Sharpener)

I probably won’t be the only one to make this point, the British blogscape being peppered with complacent, glib bastards and their over-developed sense of fair play, sorry, moral equivalence. But I think this is a cheap shot worth making.

The leak of the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s report investigating the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes alleges that the surveillance team who wrongly identified him as a suicide bomber doctored the records in an attempt to cover up their involvement in the debacle.

Still, no harm done. Just identify the culprit, slap him on the wrist and allow him to retire early due to ill health on full pension. The very model of police justice.

Just one snag.

The Daily Mail: Those on duty that day all deny involvement, which means the Independent Police Complaints Commission finds it difficult, if not impossible, to establish the truth.

When something happens in our house (spilt milk, felt tip pen marks on the sofa, the guinea pig shot eight times, that kind of thing) and nobody will admit they’re responsible, we say “the fairies must have done it”. In between getting my five year-old into trouble, those fairies are clearly busy stitching up special branch coppers.

I’ve said this before but when my brother and I were young and one of us had been up to no good but wouldn’t confess, my dad would crack us both “to make sure he got the right one”. It never did me any harm. Apart from engendering a white hot, near-pathological hatred of injustice, of course.

So, why not apply this methodology to the de Menezes surveillance team? Some may be guilty and some may be innocent but the actions of at least some of them it seems led directly to an atrocity being committed on the streets of London. They must all, of course and regardless of the evidence, be held without trial. As Charles Clarke once said: “There remains a public emergency threatening the life of the nation”. These men are, clearly and maybe, a possible and potential danger to the public. Belmarsh would seem suitable for such men and they can all be assigned a letter to protect their identities. I think we’re up to Q already.

Maybe, to get to the bottom of all this we could try a little “harsh treatment“. Nothing too drastic, maybe just the odd mock execution or a long stand? (Who, after all, as a callow youth, wasn’t sent out for a “long stand” by joshing workmates and suffered nothing more than mocking laughter ringing in their ears?)

And naturally, it needn’t be us getting our hands dirty. We could bundle the team onto one of those CIA planes, that Tony Blair knows nothing about, stopping here on its way to Syria or Uzbekistan or wherever. It’ll also save on expenses and could double up as an exchange programme - our boys gaining first hand knowledge of how the Syrian secret police do things on their manor.

After all, we do not agree with the use of torture. Is that an absolute rule? Absolute in this sense, that you say ‘Look, it is simply the civil liberties of the suspect, or simply the liberties of freedom from being shot in the head on the tube’. You have to balance those two things.

I also say it is wrong to frame this debate simply in terms of the civil liberties of suspects. Of course their liberties are important, but so are the liberties of the people who may be victims of a police shooting, what about their most basic civil liberty - the right to life?